THE ONE-LEGGED MAN
(C)1989 Alan M. Schwartz
I live hard by a major four lane boulevard in Pasadena which is
currently being resurfaced. Strange hydraulic monsters slam
yellow painted steel into the asphalt, groaning behemoths rip
away the very fabric of the road and dump it into trucks,
whistles and bells and beeps punctuate the Thud! Slam! Crack! of
asphalt being stripped down to naked dirt. A cadre of fellows in
orange vests with surveying equipment and blueprints swarms over
the brown scars spraying orange dots, followed by red shirts and
potbellies who pound steel forms and pour concrete. A vertical
foot of patched and cracked asphalt is being replaced, at great
expense and inconvenience, by an eight inch concrete slab. For
all the seven figure effort, nobody bothered to place rebar in
the hole before pouring the concrete. Rebar is that ductile
heavy steel bar with a roughened surface laced into a grid in the
center of poured concrete slabs or walls, posts or struts, or
freeways that binds the brittle concrete together when it must
bear heavy or repeated stresses, especially in tension. Concrete
without rebar has a nasty tendency to crack, split, fragment, and
crumble. How long do you think an eight inch thick slab of
concrete will survive heavily laden garbage trucks, liquid
tankers, sixteen wheel trucks and thousands of cars each day?
Hundreds of thousands of dollars has been wasted, the useful life
of the road shortened by ten or fifteen years, because a few
hundred dollars worth of reinforcing bar was omitted. If you
look swiftly you may just see a one-legged man turning the
corner, doffing his hard hat.
In the 1960's the Japanese got into television manufacture. The
American companies shared licensing, confident that their
patented vacuum tube circuitry and massive vacuum tube production
would so overwhelm the usurpers that no meaningful competition
was conceivable. No meaningful competition was conceivable, the
Japanese used transistors. The Americans said, "Heck, what
profit was there in cheap little portables, we'll give them that
and make our money on the big 19 inch consoles." As long as they
were designing from the ground up, the Japanese made picture
tubes with stronger magnets and electrostatic plates, increasing
the deflection angle of the electron beam, allowing a shorter
tube for the same size display. Given a choice between a 19 inch
console that was a piece of furniture itself or a 19 inch set
that comfortably fit on a table, used less power, was more
reliable, less expensive, and did a better job, the great
American public allowed the great American TV manufacturers to
become great American bankruptcies. The one-legged man had
earned his MBA.
America was born in violent revolution and has not hesitated --
the War of 1812, The Philippine Insurrection, the Spanish-
American War, Panama, World War One, World War Two -- to politely
request political cooperation while holding a razor-edged knife
firmly to the throat of the petitioned entity. The last great
strategic American generals, Patton and MacArthur, left a wide
swath and a broad field of defeated enemy, confident that when
enough belligerents had died the war would end. When these crude
and unacceptable dinosaurs had been cast aside, the political
generals and their civilian leeches gave us Korea, Vietnam, the
Mayaguez incident, the Iranian hostage crisis, Central America...
The Army and Navy were expanded by the Air Force when technology
improved. The Marines were created as specialists, professional
killers in service to America. Suddenly that was not nearly
enough as Green Berets and a bucketful of other "Special Forces"
were created to do the job that the traditional Armed Forces were
apparently no longer capable of handling. The special forces
begat even more special special forces. For all of this, America
is currently incapable of forcing a military solution anywhere
on the planet and is routinely and soundly defeated by Third
World guerrillas armed with hand-forged guns and even bamboo
spikes. The one-legged man has successfully run for political
office.
Life is competition, a biological, economic, political and
territorial contest bloody and sincere. We are fighting for our
lives by entering one-legged men in an ass-kicking contest. Why
are we so surprised when the competition fields men standing upon
two?